People are constantly chasing the question “how do I make my customers happy?”. There’s a lot of suggestions out there. We’ve covered many of them.

But what actually works?

We dug into tens of thousands of tickets in our UserVoice Helpdesk system and researched some of the actions that demonstrably made customers happier. Today we’re going to cover speed.

Note: We track customer happiness through the UserVoice Helpdesk “kudos” feature. At the bottom of every admin response to a customer is a link allowing that customer to give kudos to the Admin with one click. It’s a simple way to track customer happiness with a low barrier to entry, and has allowed us to determine what actions specifically incited customer happiness.

Fact #1: People like to hear from companies quickly

There’s nothing more frustrating than having an issue and waiting, waiting, waiting to hear from a company. And the numbers prove it: 25% of kudos were given to responses that came within 15 minutes!

Fact #2: People like to have their issues resolved quickly

In our research, we found that 46% percent of kudos were given after just one admin response. People also want their issues solved quickly, not over the course of many messages.

Fact #3: Quality is most important

Despite the numbers above, we still saw large numbers of kudos for issues answered more than two hours later and involving more than 5 messages. Why? Because people want the right answer, not just the quick answer.

So what are the action items for your organization? Work hard to increase your response time, but also focus on accurate solutions in your first message.

What other data would you like us to pull out of UserVoice? Let us know in the comments!